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Monday, October 26, 2015

Review of The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder

Pouncing
on the steampunk zeitgeist, Mark Hodder’s 2010 The Strange Affair of Spring HeeledJack takes the clockwork aesthetic and runs with it—as fast and
hard as it can.Victorian England, steam
horses, top hats and walking sticks, brass hovercrafts, Richard Burton (a la a Sherlock Holmes), the paranormal,
biological tinkering, cursing parrots, and a mystery involving a spring-loaded,
blue fire-breathing man on the foggy streets of London—it may be as overtly
steampunk as steampunk gets.

A
clear mix of Tim Power’s The Anubis Gates
and James Blaylock’s Langdon St. Ives
books with a lingering essence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Hodder places Richard Burton, the famous
African explorer, front and center in an alternate history adventure of late 19th century British proportion.With
secret societies, late night escapades, eugenics, Dickensian street urchins,
spontaneously exploding werewolves, roto chairs, and time travel conundrums peppering
the mix, the devices and tropes leave no doubt as to its predecessors.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack opens with one
of Burton’s main rivals for discovering the source of the Nile near death from
an apparent attempt at suicide.But it’s
being accosted by a strange, electrically sparking man with spring-loaded
stilts for legs on the street soon thereafter that truly tilts Burton’s
world.Asked by the Prime Minister to forgo his African expeditions and use his talents with language, disguise,
sword, and gumption for getting to the bottom of the Spring Heeled Jack
mystery, Burton in the thick of matters, his diminutive friend Swinburne by
his side, wandering the back alleys at night, trying to find the mysterious
electrical man who is molesting women randomly across decades.

A
third wave steampunk offering, The
Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is a novel fully aware of its
artifice.Steam powered this-and-that,
gene experiments resulting in odd animal behaviors and unnatural human creations,
politics divided between libertines and technologists, time travel, and of
course, that requisite element for all stereotypical steampunk, the
assassination of Queen Victoria.About
the only thing swaying from normal is the novel’s structure. An anti-frame
story, Hodder embeds the main conceit rather than opening and closing with
it.Mostly successful (the molestation
scenes become repetitious), it perks up a narrative that, aside from Hodder’s
colorful imagination, runs on auto-pilot.

For
this, the mainstream reader should be fully satisfied by The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack; it delivers a steampunk
aesthetic in endless spades.For a
reader looking to engage a little deeper, it’s quite likely they will find the
novel light.Powers’ The Anubis Gates more satisfying
plot-wise, Blaylock’s Homunculus more
singular, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde more concise in content and precise in prose, Hodder’s offering
is solid but lacks the cohesion of all storytelling’s elements to supersede any
of its antecedents.Rarely dipping below
the surface of its creation, the novel utilizes most if not all the major
sub-genre tropes but never examines them—fun and drama, but nothing political,
and for this is better categorized “gaslight romance”.